paved roads

[Nicolas]

Good,but it will take time to do all the tiles!

[Tux2B]

Transitions can be improved too.

[yobbo]

I felt like candy-coloured roads so here we go.

I've been staring at coloured rocks for a couple hours and they all look the same to me, so: what should I change?

I haven't done any transitions yet. Please blame Kestenvarn's signature for this. I'm not sure whether it should have straight edges, semi-rough edges, or little detatched rocks. Thoughts?

I think you should post the tiles(not as a screenshot) and transitions(if you have them).

no

Also it might be best to have the game draw the road tiles and transitions after the grass, that way it would normally be wider. A special grass-road transition shouldn't be neccessary.

I tried drawing the road transitions over grass and it made the roads way too big (twice the size they are now). I think the best thing to do would be to have roads as an overlay which could be placed on any type of terrain. This would mean we could make run-down overgrown roads by poking some holes in them. (it would also mean uhh, *counts*... a @#$%load of road tiles. *sigh*)

[freim]

I felt like candy-coloured roads so here we go.

I've been staring at coloured rocks for a couple hours and they all look the same to me, so: what should I change?

I haven't done any transitions yet. Please blame Kestenvarn's signature for this. I'm not sure whether it should have straight edges, semi-rough edges, or little detatched rocks. Thoughts?

I tried drawing the road transitions over grass and it made the roads way too big (twice the size they are now). I think the best thing to do would be to have roads as an overlay which could be placed on any type of terrain. This would mean we could make run-down overgrown roads by poking some holes in them. (it would also mean uhh, *counts*... a @#$%load of road tiles. *sigh*)

I would like to see transitions with detached rocks and "rough" edges following the actual stones. With the proposed changes to the map format overlay roads which can go over any terrain will be possible. This needs code changes though so it can take some time (and the proposal isn't final yet either).

[khamul]

I haven't done any transitions yet. Please blame Kestenvarn's signature for this. I'm not sure whether it should have straight edges, semi-rough edges, or little detatched rocks. Thoughts?

Historically, I believe from the Romans to industrial England, a well-built road is a bed of shaped large stones, with smaller stones on top built up to form a smooth, slightly convex surface, with large stones at the edge to catch run-off. A poorly built road would look similar, but would fall apart more quickly, and most roads were just muddy tracks.

Realistically, I think this would give us three different looks:
1. Well built - a well defined, slightly convex smooth surface, made from evenly sized stones, with a border of large stones.
2. Degraded - a stony but uneven surface, with stone size varying as the (loose) foundations come through. A poorly defined border, with the old surfacing stones flowing over gutter, and the gutter-stones detached from the road.
3. Track - mud, with stones more an obstacle to progress than a surface, with deep ruts cut in it by cart wheels, etc.

I think Wesnoth would probably have all 3 types of road, but I'm not volunteering to draw them, and I appreciate the work involved - I'm just hoping to give ideas for a look. I think the examples above look good, which is the most important thing

[irrevenant]

"Candy road" could maybe be a bit dirtier (people walk on it after all), but that looks damn good! It looks like rounded rocks that aren't superhumanly neat or flat...

[Eleazar]

And now, looks even better.

Having an overlay will be great, but are we planning on having multiple overlays? Because the bridge will be on the overlay, and the bridge should be over the road (on the ends). I really don't see any reason the road that couldn't be done just as well on the main layer.

Yobbo, Don't just think of this as a tile that will be only used as a narrow strip. It will also be tiled over larger areas as a courtyard or whatever. Expect people to use your terrain in every concievable way. They will. The road with the transitions over the grass is wider than your example, but i don't think it's not "too big" It would just be slightly wider than 1 hex.

Frame's suggestion about going with "detached rocks and rough edges following the actual stones" isn't just a stylistic choice, but that kind of edge would look good next to the widest range of other tiles.

We already have a "mud" road in the form of the "dirt" tile.

everybody is proposing new kinds of tiles (and i have a few more ideas that i haven't even mentioned) Currently Wesnoth uses upper and lower case letters to distinguish between them, and nearly every letter is taken. What happen when we use up all 52?

[quartex]

I use the paved road tile as indoor tiled floor. Like you might see in a temple or stone floor. Specifically it would be nice if this had a decent transition with a cave floor, becuase I often use it as a tiled path through a cave.

About being limited to 52 letters. We had this problem 6 months ago. There were long discussions about what to do becuase we were going to run out of letters soon. Oddly enough the number of new terrains slowed, and we never hit the limit.

Dave and frame had an idea of adding a $ sign to all the terrain letters, to make every terrain be represented by 2 characters instead of one. I believe frame was implementing this at one time, but I don't know how much progress he made. It would be a good idea, but probably is rather difficult.

[freim]

Having an overlay will be great, but are we planning on having multiple overlays? Because the bridge will be on the overlay, and the bridge should be over the road (on the ends). I really don't see any reason the road that couldn't be done just as well on the main layer.

What happen when we use up all 52?

Terrain can be stacked within the overlay layer just as with the main layer.

There are still talk about changing to using two letters.

See
http://www.wesnoth.org/wiki/User:Ayin/E ... s_proposal

[charlieg]

Hmm I preferred the smaller stones in the original at the start of the thread, simply because the bigger cobbles mess up the background scale, especially with the trees.

Cobbles are small by definition. And I don't know many 'large round stone' roads, even in a fantasy world.

[gryphonlord]

Hmm I preferred the smaller stones in the original at the start of the thread, simply because the bigger cobbles mess up the background scale, especially with the trees.

I would have to say that this is not a relevant issues. The trees, after all, are nearly as tall as the mountains, and the units themselves are several times higher than the trees. So unless you propose drawing new mountains that are 50 times higher than the trees ( ), I suggest you don't complain.

[Woodwizzle]

Scale is odd in wesnoth. Its hard to tell what is the appropriate scale untill someone makesa a tile that is. I think these are great and will fit in beautifully. I might like them just a hair smaller but I don't think thats a big deal at all. Can't wait to play with these!

[charlieg]

The trees, after all, are nearly as tall as the mountains, and the units themselves are several times higher than the trees. So unless you propose drawing new mountains that are 50 times higher than the trees ( ), I suggest you don't complain.

Whilst you do have a point, in that there are varying levels of scale, it does not mean scale does not matter.

If you just have two levels of scale it doesn't look as uncoordinated as three levels. The more different scales you adopt, the messier it looks. The larger cobbles add yet another scale to the backdrop.

[yobbo]

Hmm I preferred the smaller stones in the original at the start of the thread, simply because the bigger cobbles mess up the background scale, especially with the trees.

I did originally aim for a scale compatible with the houses and trees. After some thought I decided that making them a comparable scale to the unit sprites also works.

Wesnoth seems to keep on top of scaling issues with some sort of suspension of disbelief mind trick. As far as I can tell, no tile in Wesnoth is to the same scale as any other tile .

Having the tiles bigger also works for indoor / small scale scenarios. The main thing however, seems to be having them look right on their own.


That said - after some exams and a terminal hard drive failure I edge-matched the tiles properly then tried some transitions. I'm not entirely happy with them, but I'm not sure why.

Note that the paved road transitions are normally drawn over water and swamp only. I just moved it up the heirarchy for testing.

Err, I suppose to use all 3 variations you would need to edit terrain-graphics.cfg and add

Code: Select all

{TERRAIN_BASE_PROB            R road3 33}
{TERRAIN_BASE_PROB            R road2 50}

just above

Code: Select all

{TERRAIN_BASE                 R road}

EDIT: deleted screenshots 'cos I'm getting "out of space" errors trying to upload more !

[Woodwizzle]

Generally they look good,but now the roads are enormous! Is there anyway to put them at the bottom of the stack and still keep the little stones transition?

Also it seems like the only two places where the transition doesn't look good is with the water and the swamp. =)